Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Gibbon1 2105 days ago
Not widely enough understood. Influenza is a segmented virus and generates new strains by reassorment. Where two different strains of influenza infecting a cell shuffle their RNA segments to produce a third strain.

Best to think of influenza as an ever shifting and recombining family of viruses.

Covid19 has a single strand of RNA and doesn't do that.